Skill Exchange

Improve your skills by communicate

About

You are a citizen walking around the city, and speaking with other citizens. You all have some skills, so While speaking you are exchaning the skills with each other. Establish connection with as more people as possible to get highest skills!

Screenshots

Rules

I know, these rules may seem too complicated, and I don't like games with many complex rules myself, but still, I'll try to describe it as simple as possible ;D

  • there are 5 skill you can learn:

    • programming
    • art
    • science
    • natural history
    • gaming
  • see your skills at the top left corner. You start with 3 random skill with low value

  • come to people to initiate communicate

  • if communication started, you see his skills

  • hit checkmark button to start exchange the skills - in this process you are both increase your skills - the resulting values depending on skill the your companion

  • if you think this person doesn't suit you - hit cancel button and go on

  • after exchaning process you can't be able to talk with this person for some time - he has no desire to communicate yet

  • also some people don't want to communicate with you until you have some skill at some level. You can see that in orange box in person's UI. And if one skill is fit, it's green, in other case - red. Improve these skill if you wanna talk with him

  • you can get skill beside people in special buildings. Each skill can be improved in 2 buildings (but only one for programming). There are 9 buildings in the city

  • improving skills in building is always for free and not required learning any skills

  • also, skills are getting decrease with time, so try keep them at some level

    Highscores rules:

    • you are limited by time
    • in this time you need to get as more skills as possible - the final score is sum of all your skills

Control

mouse click for moving & interacting.


So, have fun! ;)

Voting results

Overall
30th
88%
4.625
Graphics
28th
82%
4.625
Audio
20th
58%
4.875
Gameplay
32nd
94%
3.875
Originality
15th
42%
6.750
Theme
18th
52%
6.750

This game entered in the Solo competition (33 entries).

Comments (13)

Mills !
(@Mills_Himself) • 4 years ago • 

Well… I'm not quite sure if I understood the rules.

I made 360 points speaking to other people, but I had no idea what do speaking really do. I have the impression than I could have randomly spoke to anyone and I would have a similar score.

Also, I think you should have put your game in a regular window, the mandatory fullscreen can sometimes be annoying

So yeah, not a bad game, but not pretty good either.

DictorDro
  • 4 years ago • 

@Mills_Himself , as it planned, you should check your skills, and find ones that need to be improved (the lowest). Then you try to find people that has these skills, or according building. But on practice, unfortunately, it turns out that you indeed can speak and get skills from every person, and get a good score at result
The balance is the weekness of this game

Thanks for feedback!

wolfingame
 • 4 years ago • 

Walking simulator isn't for me but nice try.

ratrogue
 • 4 years ago • edited • 

Well, that most certainly is an interesting interpretation of the theme. A bit more feedback in advance would be cool, which NPC would give me skills at all - most of the times I had to cancel them because they would not give me any skills, which made me sad.

Yaro
 • 4 years ago • 

Okay, I got it, I need to have enough skills to talk to people to develop skills.
It's an interesting mechanics, but I feel like there should be more challenges than just the time.
I managed to get 141!

DictorDro
  • 4 years ago • 

@ratrogue thanks for feedback!
The skills you can get from other person depends on its current level - if it low you get almost nothing. But yeah, shold be show that more obvious.

DictorDro
  • 4 years ago • 

@Yaro thanks for feedback!
I agree, now game is looks like just walking , there is a lack of balance

Colisan
 • 4 years ago • 

Nice little game here =D I managed to score 500 pts and figured out you can't go higher, so I allowed myself to submit a highscore although not really planning on participating the competition =p

What I liked :

  • The slow gameplay is quite calming
  • The colored graphics, the artstyle is simple but nice, and the colors are coherent
  • The music is simple but nice, and don't get too boring after multiple plays
  • The theme interpretation of connections as communication between people is nicely thought !

What I think could be better :

  • Lines width vary too much between sprites, i.e: houses vs lamp posts or characters
  • When you reach 100 in a skill, the UI bugs and display only "10"
  • The global UX could be enhanced a lot, I often found myself dissapointed when clicking outside of communication popup didn't close them… it's especially frustrating when I clicked on a house I didn't meant to interact with. I felt like I lost a lot time (the timer sure is adding some pressure !)
  • At first, I thought you score would be a function of how skilled people you encounter are, and wether they're willing to speak to you, so I was feeling a bit too much luck involved in my score (the people are moving seemingly randomly, sometime I found nobody in some places)… and then, I found a loophole. I managed to gather 3-4 people willing to speak to me, with complementary skills. I just had to speak to them again and again to level up both my skills and theirs, thus maxing out very quickly everything and I just had to wait for the timer to finish =(
Birdwards
 • 4 years ago • 

Interesting idea! I always like when games go for something that doesn't easily fit into an existing genre. Most of what I wanted to say has already been said, but here's one more bit to think about:

The difficulty seems to depend strongly on how many people you find without an orange bar in the early part of the game. On my first playthrough, almost everyone had an orange bar. Since I couldn't talk to them at first, I had fewer opportunities to increase my skills, which made it even harder to talk to them as the game went on. The second time around, I encountered a lot more people without orange bars early on, so I was always above the threshold to talk to people who did have orange bars, making it easy to max out my score the same way Colisan did (though I actually didn't even pay attention to whether or not their skills were complementary).

DictorDro
  • 4 years ago • 

@Colisan Big thanks for feedback! Grats with 500 points :D
Yea, I definitely should work on UI/UX

DictorDro
  • 4 years ago • 

@Birdwards thanks for feedback!
You right about people without orange bar at start. I thought about next thing: the requirements of person should be directly depend on his skills level - if he has many skills and accordingly can share skills with you - then his requirements should be pretty high; and vice versa. Now its just random. And it's needed to arrange people with hight and low requiremennts more or less evenly.

plasmastarfish
 • 4 years ago • 

Nice little entry! I was able to get 300, but accidentally closed before I could grab a screenshot.

The graphics and UI are nice and clean, and I loved the variable pitch "hello" on interaction with the various residents of this city, although it was a little odd that people's voice changed with each interaction.

The concept of interacting with various people to try to share and build up skills is an interesting take on the theme, and I think you pulled it off pretty well. I will say that by the end I was mostly just interacting with anyone I got close to, since I knew each interaction generally gave me something and it takes time to interpret people's stats.

Great work for a solo dev in 72 hours!

DictorDro
  • 4 years ago • 

@plasmastarfish , thanks for your feedback and thoughts !

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1@Colisan500 
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